#sunbelt

albuquerque islamic center. this building opened in 1979 as a bank, and still has its drive-up and pneumatic tube systems intact, as well several cool modernist lamps and brick detailing. architect unknown. albuquerque, new mexico. november 2023

Dear Seeker Scrier,

Your question makes an assumption I know not to be universally true! Some worlds see her serve the role of leader to a Seeker trio specialized in desert warfare, consisting of herself as the calm and composed leader, Duststorm, a wild and unpredictable dervish of a Decepticon, and Bankstorm, a nervous and anxious warrior who was prone to crashing. These "Desert Stormers" were well known for their rivalry with a duo of Autobots that consisted of the rambunctious Everglader and the laid-back Sunbelt.

SN: although my view of the Sunbelt skews negative, echoing a number of the author’s points in the full article and reflected in the snippet below, the author does leave the door open for hope. And in all fairness, he does highlight some of Phoenix’s urbanist achievements. As a Great Lakes native I still scoff at those who choose to live so far from water, even if the weather sucks.

“Is Phoenix doomed to fall back into the ashes?”

That is the fate many think will befall not only Phoenix, but most of the other Sunbelt cities of the United States, as well as the growing cities at the edges of the Chinese and Arabian deserts. Once Las Vegas, Tucson, El Paso and Phoenix start to experience weeks of Fahrenheit temperatures not just in the triple digits, but in the 120s and 130s, no air conditioning will be able to make them habitable.

Moreover, their sources of water, from the Colorado River to the groundwater reservoirs and aquifers hiding deep under parts of the Sonoran desert, will dry up. If social strife does not kill these beleaguered cities, the reality of climate change will.

From such a perspective, Phoenix shouldn’t even be where it is, at least not at its current size: well over four million inhabitants and growing. It is a human-made ecosystem with no grounding in the dry desert landscape using up prodigious amounts of energy just to be able to survive. But, is the place really such a waste, in every sense of the word?

According to Grady Gammage Junior, an urban-planning lawyer and analyst, the metropolitan area actually holds up quite well by most measures of sustainability. It is denser, believe it or not, than cities such as Seattle, Washington DC, Houston, Detroit, and Atlanta, and has a lower per person carbon footprint than sixteen of the largest Standard Metropolitan Areas, including New York and Chicago (although it does use more water, and at cheaper rates, than all of them).****WHAT?!?!

Moreover, it has taken quite a few steps in recent years to increase everything from density to energy conservation, while building a burgeoning light-rail system and including parks along its major transportation routes.

The romance of the open range is also the logic of the Hohokam, who built canals fanning out from the Valley’s rivers to the foothills of Camelback and other mountains. It is also the dream of dissolving the inefficient and socially stratified snarl of overly concentrated cities to try to recapture the democratic landscape of which Thomas Jefferson dreamed in far-away Virginia.